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Dancing

Theo and I walked to a nearby mall to pick up a few supplies requested by his new preschool. Of course, he couldn’t resist dancing on the large bird mosaic outside. (Really, who could?)

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This is the Core Pacific City mall in Taipei, which was a pretty big deal when it opened and was even included as a landmark in SimCity 4.

As far as malls go*, it seemed nice enough, but it was almost surreally empty. Theo and I found ourselves walking hallways and riding escalators mostly alone. Perhaps Monday afternoons aren’t the best time for  malls. Or, perhaps all of the people have flocked to the newer, shinier malls opened more recently. At least they left the bird.

* I’m not a mall person.

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And Now We’re Traveling With A Four-Year-Old

For Theo’s first birthday, there were no festivities. He was still a baby. He didn’t care. (I even checked to verify that there were indeed no photos of some celebratory measure that I had forgotten. There weren’t. It didn’t happen. However, I found photos of Theo dated four days after he turned one, at a children’s museum. So, we must not have been too horrible of parents.)

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Making Space for Helping

Theo really seems to enjoy helping with certain cooking and cleaning tasks. Here, he is washing bok choy and vacuuming the kitchen in our Taipei apartment. For me, the mental battle is remembering to that there is long-term value in incorporating him into our daily household chores, even when it takes more time and energy than just doing it myself.

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Cooking With Ivy

As Brian and I dropped off Theo at school on Tuesday, we told him that we parents were headed to school too – a cooking class at Ivy’s Kitchen. (A benefit of having childcare is that we can periodically go out together sans child. This is good for everyone’s sanity.)

In the class, we made vegetable potstickers, spring onion pancakes, and hot and sour soup, all of which were delicious. Ivy is an excellent instructor, who is clearly fascinated by cuisines and cooking in general.

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A Few More Things That I Didn’t Know About Taiwan

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It would not be hyperbole to say that we stayed in Taiwan mostly because of the flight patterns between Vietnam and Japan.  Plus, we remembered that we had friends who had enjoyed a short layover in Taipei on the way to Australia. So, we shrugged and decided to make Taiwan our home for a month, without really knowing anything about the island.

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